Remote building surveying (including building foot-print assessments, total roof geometry, and roof surface area measurements) offers an enormous potential to provide rapid, highly accurate solar energy potential, flood modeling, and stormwater run-off assessments. Systems and methods have been developed for remote building structure analysis using three dimensional geometric modeling. However, the prior-art methods generally use oblique data and images, two dimensional digitized roof data footprints, or traditional three dimensional CAD data, and generate geometric models using photogrammetry software. Using these methods, users often find that building data are required from more than one source thus adversely affecting costs. Furthermore, data manipulation and model generation often requires manual procedures, or may only be partially automated.
In response to growing environmental concerns and the need to provide a diverse energy economy, cities and municipalities are rapidly advancing programs to encourage the use of solar energy conversion to electricity. Current methods for solar radiation and photovoltaic energy potential are derived from querying and browsing GIS maps with different spatial data overlay (e.g. solar irradiation measured by local weather stations, and solar radiation models based on digital elevation models and/or raster layers). Current methods require significant volumes of overlay data, and extensive data interpolation to generate the photovoltaic potential of a roof area. The current methods also involve manual processing from remote sensing measurements shot obliquely. Moreover, well-known current methods do not enable individual home owners to determine the photovoltaic potential of their home, but only the photovoltaic potential of the surrounding area. The installation and integration of solar energy infrastructure can be costly, and often varies from roof top to roof top, thereby causing an undesirable return on investment for poorly planned installations.
Global sustainability efforts are also driving the utilization of home water collection surfaces for diversion and containment of rainwater in many cities and municipalities. Not only is the need driven by the demand for more effective management of water resources and water conservation, municipalities are realizing the need to determine tenant and owner responsibility for stormwater run-off. Management of the run-off is required in order to more effectively control local pollution of rivers, bays and coastal waters. Building data and roof area assessments can be used to more equitably and effectively implement regulations and urban drainage design.
Energy conservation efforts are driving the utilization of thermal capture images for heating or cooling energy escape assessments. There is a need for more enhanced measurement profiles related to thermal images and three dimensional roof and façade measurements. Further, energy conservation efforts are driving the utilization of new software for monitoring and optimizing energy within specific building floors. There is a need for more enhanced measurement profiles expressing information within buildings on a geospatial platform which also includes data queries and real-time monitoring. This information can be used in next generation mapping systems that can allow for greater marketing and management intelligence in government and commercial real estate property sales and management, in transaction based web maps and e-commerce sites.
Primarily driven by these emerging applications, there exists a need for systems and methods that provide more accurate, scalable, and automated building structure assessment information using stereo photographic imagery.